Educating Muslim Women

Nana Asma'u was a devout, learned Muslim who was able to observe, record, interpret, and influence the major public events that happened around her. Daughters are still named after her, her poems still move people profoundly, and the memory of her remains a vital source of inspiration and hope. Her example as an educator is still followed: the system she set up in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, for the education of rural women, has not only survived in its homeland through the traumas of the colonization of West Africa and the establishment of the modern state of Nigeria but is also being revived and adapted elsewhere, notably among Muslim women in the United States. This book, richly illustrated with maps and photographs, recounts Asma'u's upbringing and critical junctures in her life from several sources, mostly unpublished: her own firsthand experiences presented in her writings, the accounts of contemporaries who witnessed her endeavors, and the memoirs of European travelers. For the account of her legacy the authors have depended on extensive field studies in Nigeria, and documents pertaining to the efforts of women in Nigeria and the United States, to develop a collective voice and establish their rights as women and Muslims in today's societies. Beverley Mack is an associate professor of African studies at the University of Kansas. She is co-editor (with Catherine Coles) of Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century and co-author (with Jean Boyd) of The Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, 1793 1864 and One Woman's Jihad: Nana Asma'u Scholar and Scribe. Jean Boyd is former principal research fellow of the Sokoto History Bureau and research associate of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She is the author

Nana AsmaOCOu (1793u1864) was a prolific Muslim scholar, poet, historian, and educator whose legacy in Nigeria and America continues today.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/ women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.

This book draws on the stories of female educators and young Muslim women to explore issues of identity, justice and education. Situated against a backdrop of unprecedented Islamophobia and new articulations of ‘White-lash’, this book draws on case study research conducted over a ten-year period and provides insight into the diverse worlds of young Muslim women from education and community contexts in Australia and England. Keddie discusses the ways in which these young women find spaces of agency and empowerment within these contexts and how their passionate and committed educators support them in this endeavour. Useful for researchers and educators who are concerned about Islamophobia and its devastating impacts on Muslim women and girls, this book positions responsibility for changing the oppressions of Islamophobia and gendered Islamophobia with all of us. Such change begins with education. The stories in this book hope to contribute to the change process.

This important book examines the relationship between teachers and their female Muslim students in two single sex schools - one an urban comprehensive and one a private Muslim school - and explores the ways in which these relationships are affected.

Equals in Learning and Piety is an intellectual history of the ‘Yan Taru (Associates) movement, a women-led Islamic educational organization that continues to this day in both northern Nigeria and in the United States. Drawing on extensive scholarship across disciplines including history, Islamic studies, anthropology, gender and women’s studies, and literary studies—and alongside rigorous ethnographic research and interviews with leading Nigerian Muslim scholars—Beverly Mack argues that this formidable Muslim women’s movement consolidated the religious and social order established by the Sokoto Jihad in the early nineteenth century. Mack shows how women scholars instructed rural Hausa and Fulani women in Muslim ethics, doctrine, traditions, and behavior that followed and replaced the traumatic experience of warfare unleashed by the Jihad. She shows that these unique social engagements shaped people’s agency in the dynamic process of social change throughout the nineteenth century. Women imaginatively reconciled Muslim reformist doctrines and traditional practices in Nigeria, and these doctrines have continued to be influential in the diaspora, especially among Black American Muslims in the United States in the twenty-first century. With this major investigation of a little-studied phenomenon, Mack demonstrates the importance of women to the religious, political, and social transformation of Nigerian Muslim society.

Study of lower income middle class women in urban Delhi.

This examination of the several considerations and factors that influence the schooling of Muslim girls is the first of its kind, based on first-hand information from interviews, documents and reports, and empirical studies. It argues that state policies and initiatives on education, regional location, social and economic compulsions, as well as changing community perceptions are critical to our understanding of why the educational attainment of Muslim girls continues to remain below average. The authors draw on their Survey findings on girls' education, based on data collected across the country, to present a macro consideration of the complex factors that influence Muslim girls' schooling. They can compare the experiences of five distinct locations Delhi, Aligarh, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Calicut and attempts a situational, micro analysis of these factors, identifying some critical elements that determine their educational status. By doing so they succeed in dispelling prevalent misperceptions regarding 'community conservatism' and resistance to change and advocate more pro-active affirmative action by the state.